The Wilderness Warrior - Douglas Brinkley [271]
Refusing to be nursed, Roosevelt threw himself back into the fray. Besides running the White House, he had six children to raise. His eldest, Alice, was sixteen years old; the youngest, Quentin, was four. Promoting the strenuous life for his own brood, the president oversaw pillow fights, wrestling matches, roller-skating, and leapfrog throughout the White House. Furniture and china were regularly broken. All sorts of native plants were ordered, to give certain rooms a more natural feel. Because the White House was under renovation, however, the Roosevelt family had to live at 22 Jackson Place—across from the White House—for several weeks. Whenever T.R. traveled away from Washington, D.C., he wrote his children letters. In the coming years they would receive missives from Yellowstone, the Grand Canyon, the lower Mississippi River, Yosemite, the Painted Desert, and dozens of other extraordinary American outdoor places he was determined to pass on to his progeny as a legacy.84
“Will you tell me how things are in the Yellowstone Park as regards game protection?,” Roosevelt wrote John Pitcher at Yellowstone on October 24, 1902. “I know the buffalo are almost gone, and I know how difficult it is to protect the beaver. How are the elk being protected? Is there much slaughter of them in the forest preserves outside of the Park, and is there much poaching of them in the Park itself? How are they holding their own? I should be very much obliged if you would give me any information about the game in the Park. What force of rangers have you?”85
Undergirding Roosevelt’s promotion of the American wilderness from 1901 to 1909 was Darwinism—a word uttered reverently by the president. In Nature’s Economy (1977) the historian Donald Worster writes, convincingly, that ecology after Darwinism became a “dismal science” in America. Roosevelt, it seems, was an exception to this rule. When Darwin, for example, traveled to South America he encountered the “violence of nature,” including huge vultures, stalking jaguars, vampire bats, and poisonous snakes. It was a frightful land of volcanoes, earthquakes, and insect swarms. Everywhere Darwin looked in the jungles of South America there were “the universal signs of violence.” Ironically, Roosevelt was thrilled by nature’s violent side. He wasn’t like John Muir studying ferns or John Burroughs praising bluebirds. The blood-and-guts aspect of Darwin’s account appealed to Roosevelt. The president, in fact, felt part of the bond of violence. Tumult, cataclysm, horror, and brutality in nature taught Roosevelt to immerse himself in defiance and struggle. On hunting excursions he was engaged in the dark pageant of earth, where death was always looming.86
Forget Progressivism or Republicanism. From late 1901 onward President Roosevelt behaved like a Darwinian ideologue, disseminating the great naturalist’s ideas as if they were providential. It’s impossible to understand anything Roosevelt did or said without taking Darwin, Huxley, and Spencer into consideration. There was never a time when Roosevelt, the politician as inquiring scientist, didn’t want to know everything about the organic makeup of a forest reserve or a seabird or a moose antler. Besides being a utilitarian conservationist, Roosevelt felt he had a duty to inventory and catalog every type of beetle, lizard, mouse, pine cone, seedling, and wildflower in America. Like a modern-day Thomas Jefferson he wanted all of the American West cataloged as thoroughly as Darwin had cataloged the Galápagos. His handpicked Lewises and Clarks, in this regard, were employees of the Biological Survey, forestry experts like Pinchot, Audubonists of every stripe, and Bullock and Warford outdoors types. It was Roosevelt’s obsession with the truths of Darwinism and pragmatism of Pinchot that made his conservation policies so much more ambitious than those of